The Creative Pulse podcast

MAESTRO is a Spanish artist who divides his time between the eastern coast of Spain and the western coast of the United States. He studied, trained and developed a professional practice as an architect and designer before beginning his artistic career. After immigrating to the United States, MAESTRO picked up a phone with a minimal data plan. The images on his screen often failed to load and he fo...

Louisa Deasey has been a professional writer for more than 20 years and her specialty is crafting memoirs. She says that true stories, well-told, have the power to change the world. In her captivating memoir, A Letter From Paris , Louisa shares how she received a message out of the blue from a stranger in France, telling her about a stack of letters written decades before about a man she hardly kn...

Simon Arizpe is an award-winning pop-up book designer, paper engineer and illustrator based in Brooklyn, NY. He’s a graduate of The Pratt Institute, has worked in the field of pop-up book design for over 20 years and was recently an artist-in-residence at Zion National Park. He’s designed more than 35 pop-up books to date and works on every aspect of the process, from concept to publication. His b...

Sammie Aplin works in the healthcare field but a few years ago, in her free time, she began to do daily beach clean-ups in her community. She noticed there was a lot of plastic litter on the shore and wanted to do something about it, viewing this waste as a resource. Before long, her creative mind saw a way to give these items a second life in thought-provoking, eye-catching, structured, yet whims...

Laurence Winram is a talented land artist who makes his professional living as an award-winning commercial and fine art photographer. He spends his free time following his passion by creating land art in forests, on beaches and anywhere inspiration finds him. He uses natural, found items such as leaves, flowers, sticks and stones, to create ephemeral works of art featuring geometric patterns, size...

Kristy Gordon is a Canadian-born artist living in New York City who is an accomplished painter, teacher and writer. Her work has been widely exhibited and her paintings hang in more than 600 collections worldwide. She’s a three-time recipient of the prestigious Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant and has participated in residencies and apprenticeships in Italy, China, Norway and France. She’s...

Fern Piyachut Rusmeeroj is a trained architect who followed her creative passion and developed a career making miniature models of structures and their contents. She designs and makes scaled representations of buildings, homes, shops and more, for both individuals and commercial clients. Imagine your own home and everything in it, created at a size that you could display on a coffee table. It’s li...

Mark Jones has dedicated over 25 years to empowering the next generation of creatives. His book, The Starving Artist Myth, challenges long-standing stereotypes about creative careers, advocating for the economic and social value they contribute to the world.  Mark is an accomplished educator, producer and author, known for bridging the worlds of culture, technology and education and his insight in...

Alimo has been drawing and creating for as long as he can remember and while he was in art school he had an experience that challenged his ideas and changed the way he thinks about art to this day. He’s built a creative universe within which he works, designing and making fine art, NFT collections, sustainable clothing, products, murals, commissions and commercial projects. Alimo's artwork is...

After collecting thousands of colourful bottle caps over several years, Jeff Meszaros had a brilliant idea - he could create a mosaic using these unconventional art supplies. Through trial and error, Jeff developed techniques to flatten and layer the caps in a unique way, allowing him to create textured portraits and images that also include 'easter eggs' that can be found when they’re v...

Brent Estabrook is an artist who’s known for his large-scale, colourful oil paintings of stuffed animals - often huge piles of them, all cuddled up together. He combines challenging techniques with a childlike sense of joy, creating textured and vibrant compositions. And the more you look at his detailed works, the more treasures there are to discover. His style has evolved over time, exploring re...

Jayce Hall is a micrography word artist, drawing portraits using only combinations of letters that he repeats hundreds, or even thousands, of times. By precisely controlling the size of the letters he hand draws, as well as their spacing, density, and intensity of colour, he can make a portrait magically emerge out of the characters on the canvas. His word art portraits have been featured by ESPN...

Hannah Veiga is a multidisciplinary artist whose specialty is pyrography - the art of woodburning. She draws intricate scenes, freehand, by making burn marks in carefully chosen, sustainably-sourced pieces of wood. Hannah strives to create designs that complement the wood and its grain, with her design emerging through it as if it was meant to be there all along. On this episode, host Angela de Bu...

Dylan Sadiq is known as the College Cuber and he is a proud first-generation college graduate who earned a biomedical engineering degree from Rutgers University. He combines his engineering knowledge with his creativity to design and make detailed, large-scale portraits out of colourful cubes (like the ones Rubik’s makes). His passion for sports is reflected in his work, creating artworks of profe...

Dan Lam is an internationally acclaimed contemporary artist, known for her bold and unique sculptures. Her otherworldly, drippy sculptural work pushes boundaries and explores intriguing contrasts by mixing unconventional materials, organic forms and bright colours. She is a major hit on social media, with over a million people following her @sopopomo Instagram and TikTok accounts, which stands for...

Jeremy Booth built a successful career as a digital illustrator, working with some of the biggest brands in the world. He also made his personal artworks available to collectors through NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and created an NFT series focused on a Western art theme featuring landscapes and cowboys, falling in love with the subject and tradition of Western art in the process. Jeremy made a bold...

Kevin Collins is the CEO of Secret Walls, a global phenomenon founded by Terry Guy in 2006. They’re known for exhilarating live paint battles that showcase the extraordinary talent of global artists and captivate audiences with high-energy creative showdowns. Secret Walls battles consist of two teams of artists that go head-to-head, armed with nothing but their imagination and black paint, as they...

Greg Mike is a contemporary artist known for his signature characters, bold street art, mural paintings and Larry Loudmouf icon that blend intensely colourful designs with surrealist pop culture. His artistic mantra is “Live Life Loud”. Based in Atlanta, Greg is also the founder and curator of ABV Gallery which focuses on the New Contemporary movement, exhibiting over 500 emerging and established...

Hello friends!  I’m your host Angela de Burger and although I can’t believe it, we are already at the time of the year when I turn the microphone towards you because I’m curious to hear if you have a tip for staying creative, for moving forward when you feel a little stuck, or for getting the creative energy flowing again. So I’m asking you the same question I ask my guests on every episode: What...

Marcella Young grew up participating in the performing arts, studying literature and cultivating a love of storytelling. But over time, she became less involved in that world as she built a successful career in an entirely different field. But still… that pull towards performing was always there. She decided to challenge herself several years ago by signing up for an improv class at the iconic Sec...

Katie McKinstry Stylos developed a passion for the mountains and climbing at a young age and it’s been her passion ever since. She’s a nature-loving artist who uses pre-loved climbing rope as her medium - and the results are incredible! Every piece of her rope art is one-of-a-kind and impossible to duplicate. Prior to being transformed into art, the climbing rope has already lived a full life, saf...

Janel Hawkins is living her dream by creating awe-inspiring sand sculptures that redefine what is possible in this temporary medium. Her creations dot the beaches of the Gulf Coast in the United States, bringing joy to those lucky enough to stumble upon them before they disappear forever. Janel has made sand sculptures in many different shapes - from NASA rockets, to armadillos, ghosts, dragons, d...

Karlee Porter is a creative quilter who loves everything about what is possible with this art form. In addition to valuing traditional approaches, Karlee has also developed brand new techniques and shares her skills and talents through workshops, online classes, quilting patterns, and her own book series. She invented graffiti quilting, a free motion quilting method where you take many different e...

Ernesto Lemke uses LEGO® bricks to create portraits using the unique brickpainting technique he developed. Incredibly, he makes these brick paintings without the use of software - he uses only his painter's eye and artistic vision to create his pieces. Ernesto has been featured in several television shows, including LEGO® Masters, where he created an incredible van Gogh portrait that got lots...

Tinka Robev and Andrew Azzopardi design and produce contemporary puzzles that feed the soul and challenge the mind. These are not your average, everyday puzzles - they feature intricately-cut pieces that turn tried-and-true puzzle solving tactics upside down. They even come with difficulty ratings - that’s how challenging some of these puzzles are to solve. They weren’t always puzzle makers. After...